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Comment by jjani | Hacker News Reader

For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws.

> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

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> And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.

Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.

This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.

The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.

My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...

Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated.

The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"

If you try to take the average of the views of all HN users, and use that as a representative HN user, you are going to be confused.

"letter" here wasn't intended to mean "letter of the law", rather "letter of whatever we tell you to do".

“today”

They can and will change it later.

Isn't Apple just not paying those fines? I mean that $2bn (0.5bn?) is what, 1%? Operating Income is ~109Bn[0]

[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/

Would love a source on them not paying. They've appealed the latest one rather than refusing to pay [0].

The 500 million one is also for anti-trust rather than GDPR, which is the one that includes % global revenue fines.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Has Apple or Google actually paid any of this large GDPR fines?

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